Roberts, who has been away from game development for several years, said it was the right time to make Star Citizen thanks to the arrival of the "digital connected world" providing online distribution and updates.

He also said the arrival of high-end PC visuals - ten times those of current generation consoles, comparable to the CGI in the Wing Commander film - would provide the perfect level of immersion of the project.

Talking about the potential audience for the game, he believes that the genre has never gone away, but laid dormant in his absence.

"It's mostly that people haven't been doing interesting [space games]," he explained.

"The genre doesn't feel like it's moved on for a long time. It's not like a genre dies - it's the same with movies - it's just more about whether it's a good film or not.

"There was a point of time where they said sci-fi is dead, but then someone makes whatever it is, and it's huge. It's not whether a genre is dead, it's whether it's people are making good movies for it."

On release, Star Citizen will adopt a Guild Wars-style business model, where players initially buy into the game by purchasing a ship, and won't be charged a monthly subscription.

Players can register their interest with a Minecraft-style crowd funding model starting this month through the official Cloud Imperium Games Corporation website.

The advantage of buying early is to purchase their starter ship at a lower cost, and to enter into alpha builds - a multiplayer space combat build in eight months and an alpha of the persistent universe a year after that - which is "well before" the game releases.